In Zach and Kelly Weinersmith’s Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything, you’ll run across the story of the engineer who built a giant space gun in Barbados.

Gerald Bull dreamed of using mega guns to launch missiles and satellites into outer space. The guns would be far cheaper than rockets, he thought. With funding from U.S. and Canadian defense agencies, he managed to blast projectiles into the Earth’s upper atmosphere. When government funding dried up, he turned to the arms trade to fund his plans, was charged with illegally transferring munitions, served four months in jail, was hired by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq to work on a supercannon called Project Babylon, and died under murky circumstances in a Brussels hotel in 1990.

Bull’s story is one of many surprises in the Weinermiths’ entertaining and substantive tour of futuristic technologies in Soonish (Penguin, $30), which the authors will discuss at Interabang Books at 7 p.m. Thursday.

“We tried to cram as much humor and information into the book as possible,” said Zach. “We figured one would buy the other for us.”

The space guns are part of a chapter on reducing the costs of space exploration, and engineers are still figuring out how to make them work.

“Right this second, it runs you about $10,000 to send a pound to space,” they write. “That’s about $2,500 per cheeseburger.” The current U.S. space travel program’s limitations stem not from a lack of scientific ingenuity but from the high cost of space exploration. Gizmos they call “Giant Giant Giant Enormous Mega-Superguns” are one possible solution, as are space elevators, reusable rockets and spaceplanes.

Elsewhere, the book explores mining asteroids to build settlements in space; 3D-printing organs; programming matter so that a single bucket of goop can morph into a wrench or a bicycle; and computer-brain interfaces that can connect people’s minds. “For example, you could put someone in a moment you experienced, and they could see what you saw, smell what you smelled, feel how you felt,” they write.

Soonish is a mind-meld between Kelly, an adjunct professor at Houston’s Rice University, where she researches parasites, and Zach, a popular cartoonist known for his web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Both were fascinated by science long before they met as students in Northern California.

Their last name is an agglomeration of Smith — Kelly’s maiden name — and Weiner, Zach’s last name before he married Kelly.

Kelly, who published scientific papers under the name K.L. Smith, grew frustrated that she couldn’t find her own work among tens of thousands of other papers by K.L. Smiths. She figured she would take Zach’s name when they married. But a quick search of “K.L. Weiner” also turned up thousands of entries. “I’m not becoming a Weiner unless there’s a benefit there,” she thought. So they pooled their resources and came up with a name that is possibly unique to them.

Soonish started as a list of 50 technologies that could inspire teenagers interested in science to pursue a scientific career. The Weinersmiths then decided they wanted to write longer chapters that went beyond what one could easily find in a Google search. So they narrowed the list to 10 ideas that were mind-bending yet stood at least a decent chance of being realized.

They divided up the chapters and took a month to research and draft each one, then traded them back and forth and worked on each other’s writing. “We went to the primary literature,” said Kelly. “We’d read academic press books and manuscripts. We wanted to make sure we were offering something beyond what would be in a popular science article.”

After the first drafts were done, Kelly called three or four scientific experts per chapter and incorporated the new material. Then Zach added humor and drew cartoons to match each theme. The humor is both a logical outgrowth of Zach’s profession and a tool to help pull readers through the more complex passages. “Our philosophy was that if we put in some humor people would relax,” said Zach.

Book-writing was a natural outgrowth of the couple’s relationship. When they first dated, they took long walks together after hours of studying in the library. They discussed all the new things they had learned. Now, with two small children, they had less time for walks but stayed up after their kids’ bedtimes discussing fusion power and robotic construction.

There were challenging times, such as when one spouse ripped into another’s lovingly crafted passage or chapter. Over time they grew better at dispensing and accepting criticism. They tried to follow two simple rules: 1) communicate well, and 2) for any given task someone must be the leader. “If you just do those two things, it goes pretty well,” said Zach.

They are as honest about the downsides of technology as they are about the pitfalls of book collaboration.

In a section about companion robots, they note that humans can be disturbingly submissive to droids. One study found that humans blindly followed malfunctioning robots during fire alarms instead of relying on their own knowledge of nearby exits.

Along those same lines, in a part of the book dedicated to chapters they killed, they briefly explore the idea of “mirror humans” — lab-generated humans made up of molecules that are mirror opposites of the ones that make up present-day humans. These creatures would look exactly like us but would be immune to all diseases on Earth.

Unfortunately, they would also be unable to eat most of the food on our planet or ingest most of our medicines.

The Weinersmiths hope that people who read Soonish will feel inspired to take on the problems scientists have yet to solve.